In a stop-at-nearest-floor operation, for example, an earthquake emergency return operation of a conventional elevator, as soon as a seismic sensor senses an earthquake, the car stops at the nearest floor and causes the users to get off. After that, until the operation returns to a normal operation, the doors are kept closed and the elevator is at a standstill to prevent the users from getting on the car.
Inspections by maintenance personnel is necessary for returning to a normal operation. However, for example, as described in Japan Elevator Association Standard JEAS-416, when only a small-scale-earthquake detecting device which detects small-scale earthquakes has operated, in some cases, it is determined that this is an earthquake of such a scale as might pose no problem even if an elevator is operated after the finish of the earthquake and the elevator is returned to a normal operation after automatically resetting a seismic sensor.
In this connection, in some cases, a floor at which an elevator is at a standstill becomes an emergency landing entrance floor which is not served usually. This emergency landing entrance floor is not provided with hall buttons for calling cars. For this reason, even when the operation of the elevator returns to a normal operation, the users cannot use the elevator from the emergency landing entrance floor at which they got off the car. That is, it is necessary for the users to move by stairs or the like to other floors at which the elevator can be used. In contrast to this, wheelchair users cannot use stairs and are shut up in the emergency landing entrance floor.
Therefore, as a solution to the problem that when a car comes to a standstill in an emergency landing entrance floor due to a stop-at-nearest-floor operation, wheelchair users are shut up in a hall until they are rescued from the outside, there have been proposed methods which are such that there are provided an evacuation floor for physically-handicapped people and a general evacuation floor, and these floors are properly used depending on the existence or nonexistence of physically-handicapped people, whereby evacuation and guidance are positively carried out (refer to Patent Literature 1, for example).